UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "TouchStory: Interactive Software Designed to Assist Children with Autism to Understand Narrative" Megan Davis (Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of Hertfordshire) 25 February 2009 (Wednesday) Lecture Theatre E350 Hatfield, College Lane Campus 3 - 4 pm Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available. Everyone is Welcome to Attend Abstract: This talk will describe the design and development, over successive long term studies, of TouchStory, which is an interactive software game designed specifically to assist children with autism to understand narrative. The work falls under the umbrella of the Aurora project (www.aurora-project.com) which is a long-term research project that investigates the potential enhancement of the everyday lives of children with autism through the use of robots and other interactive systems in playful contexts. Autism is a lifelong pervasive disability which affects social interaction and communication. The motivation for TouchStory is that children with autism exhibit a deficit in narrative comprehension which adversely impacts their social world. Our intention was develop an interactive software system which promotes an understanding of narrative structure (and thus the social world) while addressing the needs of individual children. The conceptual approach developed is to break down narrative into proto-narrative components; the hypothesis being that it is possible to help children with autism to improve their narrative skills by addressing proto-narrative components independently. The proto-narratives are presented as simple game-liketasks, called t-stories, in a human-computer interaction context using a touch screen as the interaction device. The intention is to gradually increase, over multiple sessions, the proportion of t-stories from proto-narrative categories which the individual participant finds challenging, while retaining sufficient scope for the expression of skills already mastered for sessions to be enjoyable and rewarding. As no ordering of difficulty could be known a priori among the proto-narrative categories for any individual child, and may vary from child to child, adaptation is achieved through the introduction of a simple adaptive formula, which was developed over successive long term studies. Results will be presented from three studies. The results indicate that many participants were actively engaged with TouchStory, they appeared to enjoy the TouchStory sessions on as many as 20 occasions, and appeared eager to 'get the right answer'. The results strongly suggest that for engaged participants the adaptation does focus on individual learning zones, such that the participant actively engages in self-directed, curiosity-driven learning which he or she can generalise to previously unseen t-stories. Designing software for children with autism is difficult, while we cannot expect any magic fixes, this work forms a small but significant contribution. --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq